Headlands Center for the Arts

In a fascinating examination of our shared and continuing histories, artist collective Bik Van der Pol (AIR ’18) is working with a massive, 3-D scale model of San Francisco created by the Works Progress Administration in the late 1930s. They will bring parts of the model to San Francisco Public Library neighborhood branches in early 2019 to catalyze discussion about the past, present, and future of the city as part of their project, Take Part. In this discussion, the artists talk with local experts about the model’s production, archiving, and reassembly as a practice of “collective aesthetics.”

Bik Van der Pol is artists Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol. Based in the Netherlands, the duo has created conceptual, interdisciplinary art projects internationally, investigating the practices and relationships that shape communities, institutions, and governments. Inspired by (and named for) Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s systematic approaches to developing creativity in groups, Take Part includes an invitation for cultural workers, and everyone else, to participate.

Take Part is commissioned by SFMOMA’s Public Knowledge initiative and made possible by the Artist in Residence Program at Headlands Center for the Arts, where Bik Van der Pol is in residence this the fall of 2018. The lecture will be held at the Koret Education Center at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, located at 151 3rd Street, San Francisco.

Above: WPA workers constructing wood scale model map of San Francisco, 1930s; photo courtesy the San Francisco Planning Department Archive at the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library